New Bedford fisheries net a catch of international buyers

The rule of the day was "hairnetworking" when a coterie of top international seafood buyers descended on New Bedford on Tuesday for a tour of the city's fisheries.

ALEXIS HAUK

NEW BEDFORD — The rule of the day was "hairnetworking" when a coterie of top international seafood buyers descended on New Bedford on Tuesday for a tour of the city's fisheries.

Organized by the Massachusetts Export Center, the tour was designed to show off the city's key industry and to coax new buyers into the fold.

In a veritable United Nations of seafood seekers, the slate of prospective buyers hailed from all over the world — Bulgaria, Russia, China, Thailand, Turkey, the Netherlands, Canada and France.

"We believe in rolling out the red carpet whenever we have a visitor," Mayor Scott W. Lang told the group. It helps, of course, when those visitors happen to be in the market for lobster, scallops and fish.

Led by senior international trade adviser Nancy Lowd and Kristin Decas, executive director of New Bedford's Harbor Development Commission, the delegation arrived at 8 a.m. after spending two days surrounded by New England's finest catches at the International Boston Seafood Show at the Massachusetts Convention Center.

To tour the local fisheries, in a nod to sanitary codes, they all donned hairnets.

According to Food Export USA seafood program coordinator Colleen Coyne, last year's international buyers' visit to New Bedford drew $2 million over one weekend. More significantly, she said, the visit creates new, possibly long-term clients.

They were there in the name of commerce, but the buyers also got an education.

Courtesy of Capt. Paul Lane, they saw film footage of the dredging process and climbed aboard an actual fishing boat. Richard Canastra at the Whaling City Seafood Display Auction demonstrated his company's online auction system, which he says can easily peddle 100,000 pounds of scallops in 20 minutes.

"If it's me eating scallops, I like them straight off the boat," Northern Wind Inc. account executive Paul Rego said shortly after he astonished the visitors by holding up a 12-pound lobster as it batted him languidly with its tail.

Although some businesses were clearly booming, not everyone had the best news for the visitors.

Fuel prices and bad luck have plagued Northern Pelagic Group LLC for the past year. Billie Schofield greeted visitors there flanked by some empty processing stations.

"This year the fish are being very evasive," he said. "We just haven't been able to find them."

Then he added, "They're smarter than us."

Huiming Chen, vice president of Pan Fish (Sha) Ltd., had traveled in the past four days from Shanghai to Detroit to Boston before heading to New Bedford. Still, his spirits were unassailable as keynote speaker Kevin D. Stokesbury, a scientist from the Marine Fisheries Field Research Group, gave his keynote address.

For 10 years, Stokesbury and a crew of scallop experts have run 114 cruises, totalling 900 days at sea, aboard 24 vessels. They have made progress studying the ecological effects of dredging in scallop-heavy areas, but they are still learning how the populations move.